Rekha: Trying to dodge a campaign issue?

Feb. 8, 2014

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For those of us who weren’t sure what to feel about last month’s closing of an abuse-riddled state home for juvenile girls — Relief, as in good riddance? Suspicion about the motives? Worry over the fate of girls and staff? — a Polk County judge’s ruling brings both clarity and new concerns about the political calculus that may have led the governor to do it.

In ordering the reopening of the Iowa Juvenile Home in Toledo, closed last month under orders from Gov. Terry Branstad, District Judge Scott Rosenberg criticized Branstad for ignoring state law. “We are a nation of laws,” Rosenberg said in ruling the executive branch cannot “unilaterally decide which laws it will obey and which laws it will not.”

The law at issue in the suit against the Branstad administration, brought by four Democratic state lawmakers and the head of the state employees’ union, says a governor can’t, after the fact, ignore an appropriation by the Legislature to operate the home through this June. Rosenberg ruled that Branstad “had the opportunity to end its operation when the appropriations bill was placed upon his desk for signature.” Or he could have waited until the next budget cycle.

So why the swift, unilateral action, giving only five weeks’ notice to the home’s 21 residents and 93 workers? To protect residents from further abuses? To protect Branstad from having the state’s neglect of problems become a campaign issue? Or to further his goal of privatizing state functions to shrink government?

The decision followed the disclosure by the federally-funded Disability Rights Iowa of abusive and illegal practices at the home, most notably the isolation of girls in small, unfurnished concrete block cells — one for almost a year. As the Register’s Clark Kauffman has reported, the practice has been ongoing for at least 17 years — even, at times, in violation of court orders.

Though Branstad never acknowledged his Department of Human Services’ failure to stop abuses before various other state agencies weighed in, he cited those abuses in the decision to close it. DHS Director Chuck Palmer last summer even defended the use of long-term isolation cells, telling the Register, “Sometimes not using seclusion introduces the same risk, if not higher.”

Yet Palmer sided with Branstad to argue for closing the home, telling a Senate committee that outdated and unsafe residential cottages necessitated that — though he had never asked the Legislature for money to upgrade them.

Meanwhile, the state attorney general, representing Branstad, has fought to prevent the release of documentary evidence of alleged mistreatment at the home.

Sen. Jack Hatch, one of the lawsuit’s plaintiffs and a candidate for governor, says the DHS was aware of the issues for three years, but “didn’t acknowledge anything was wrong.” Only one other facility in Iowa, Four Oaks, could meet the needs of the Juvenile Home’s girls, but it can only take so many, he said, adding, “These girls have failed at all other placements.”

Hatch thinks the home’s culture could be changed with new leadership (the superintendent and clinical director resigned in 2012), staff re-training, accreditation and independent oversight.

State law forbids some of the people who had been at the home — which included kids with mental or behavioral problems, in addition to court-ordered juvenile lawbreakers — from being there. The Iowa Juvenile Home Protection Task Force had recommended cutting it back to 20 girls with criminal histories — assuming the home could stay open with so few.

It’s unclear if the state, even now, is capable of properly managing the home. But the issue here is why the governor closed it so suddenly and unlawfully, resulting in some young people entrusted to the state’s care being shipped off to detention centers and shelters, and two running away. Why did he not wait until the next fiscal year, to allow for a more orderly transition? Maybe because that would have given the Legislature a chance to weigh in.

Branstad claimed he was acting in the best interests of “these kids.” But by washing his hands of a problem-riddled facility that his administration had failed to properly manage, was he also washing his hands of an at-risk population?

If the kids’ best interests mattered, wouldn’t he have made some heads roll when they were mistreated? Or, at the very least, made sure they had a safe place to go when they were shut out?